Art or Science: Creative Marketing and PR

There’s an old saying that half of all advertising budgets are wasted but marketers never know which half. That phrase was coined long before the rich analytics the web provides — and that might lead us to believe we could figure out which half and therefore improve the results.

Certainly, there’s a science to marketing: create, publish and analyze. It’s experimenting and then calculating the gain or loss in visitors, page views and conversions. And it’s true that studying data can improve results. That’s why email marketers use A/B tests and why e-commerce specialists tweak the location, prominence and copy behind calls to action on the web.

Like most people, I’m a creature of habit. I like process and methodology. I like measurement. I like data. And I think these things are important. But the longer I’m in this industry, the more convinced I’ve become that there is an art to marketing and PR is an under-recognized talent.

We can teach art students about primary and secondary colors — that red and green makes yellow — but only the artist can put them together in a way that evokes a reaction. Or better still, an action on our call. The web is proof of this: it’s a product of just two choices — 1’s and 0’s — yet these numbers have been arrayed in such innumerable combinations so as to produce the dynamic web we find today.

Creative Marketing, Puzzles and Mysteries

In the book, What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell breaks down the distinction between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle is when we have all of the pieces we need to make a complete picture, we just need to arrange them in the proper order so that they make sense. With a mystery, information is scarce and we instead rely on intuition, interference or a gut feeling. Perhaps this is what Rumsfeld meant when he famously said, “unknown unknowns.”

Gladwell places this in the context of a medical examination. In the past, a doctor might examine a patient and determine a lump in a specific location is cancerous. Today, he or she might test the for levels of certain cells in the body that indicate what is potentially cancerous. It occurred to me there are tradeoffs: in the former, the determination is conclusive, but comes very late, while in the latter the prognosis is less certain, but comes early. There’s time to do battle.

But indications can also be wrong. Just this week a member of my family was hospitalized. The doctor noticed a mass and concluded cancer. Imagine how the mind races for 24 hours only to find out the next day the conclusion was wrong. This has gotten me to thinking about data and the judgment calls we make based on data.

Ten years ago I lost my father to brain cancer, the final chapter of a seriously complicated medical history. When the cancer placed so much pressure on his brain that he lost motor function in one side of his body, doctors sent him home: nothing wrong. Only with my mother’s persistence, did a better hospital, Mass General, which is affiliated with Harvard, admit him.

In either the case, what if follow up tests hadn’t been done? The medical community (at large) might consider this irresponsible, and while marketing or PR usually doesn’t include life or death situations, how often do we make decisions without follow up tests?

Testing takes time, we can have space or we can have time, but rarely both: we can trade space for time, or time for space.

More importantly, how often are creative ideas stopped before they get started for lack of data? Testing takes time, we can have space or we can have time, but rarely both: we can trade space for time, or time for space. Balancing those trade-offs is an art form unto-itself. Marketers may well be trading time for market share.

Big Data Promise

There’s a lot of promise in big data. If we amass enough of it, we can predict anything, or so the promise goes. Yet the irony of creatures of habit is that we are often irrational: people are unpredictable.

The stock market is a clear illustration that’s rendered in the form of a disclaimer on countless financial reports: past performance is not an indication of future results. There’s a plethora of data for traders and while we can analyze the puzzle of a particular company’s performance after the fact, accurately predicting the future success or decline remains a mystery.

This is where the under-recognized art of creative PR and marketing can make a difference. The intuition of connecting with the unpredictable. This is irrational, just like our buyers and our advocates, and it makes decision-makers uncomfortable. But discomfort dissuades complacency, like the kind that occurs when we take solace in believing the data has all the answers.

Emotions, for example, are powerful anchors for captivating the irrational. Love and hope are steady anchors. This is why puppy dog eyes are a marketer’s delight, why memes are so well “liked” and why campaigns to stop hunger or poverty, that are rich with stressful visuals that are powerful, yet depressing, tend to lag.

It may seem counterintuitive — why wouldn’t such images result in action? It’s because people don’t want to identify with the upsetting. We have enough stress in our lives; we don’t need more of it in our Facebook streams. It’s easier to look away when no one’s looking back.

On the other hand, we can market to anger if we want people to hate us…or hate others. It’s a marketing strategy we often find in politics; just look at the vitriol on both sides of the 2nd Amendment debate right now. Abortion. Taxes. Foreign policy. Take your pick. Anger galvanizes the base but it also divides; the lines of anger-marketing are not blurred. They are linked, liked, disliked, retweeted, bookmarked and embedded

But it’s risky business. Risky marketing. It’s not comfortable.

Intuition, not data, will tell us when its appropriate to tie onto these anchors and when it’s not. The puzzle will show us the data only after the fact and not before; we’ll only know it’s too late…when it’s too late.

A Leader or a Leading?

Like the distinction between a puzzle and a mystery, there’s a difference between being a leader and leading — as an adjective and not a verb. A leader is first. It’s clear and compelling that there’s only one. There may be several people or organizations that are leading, but usually these are near copies to the extent they are perhaps indistinguishable, lack differentiation, at least based on the value proposition or marketing message. One company doesn’t make a move until the other one has; it’s polite competition.

Marketing, in this case, is conducted by edict: “Who else has done this successfully?” With questions like that, certainly we will not. Don’t dare be too different. How many companies do you know reached $1 billion in revenue with the status quo? There’s a difference between those that make it and those that make it and you know them. The latter attracts better talent and one billion turns into two — that’s how Division III college football programs, that absent the incentive of scholarships, attract talented players. Everybody wants to win. You can’t begin a career in the NFL.

We see this in the airline industry often especially with regard to price — one of the classic 4P’s of marketing. When one airline cuts prices, the travel columnist to almost always asks, “Will this force other airlines to match the price?” Yet these moves by the airlines are often defensive — to stave off a competitor — rather than offensive — to seize and hold new ground. It’s leading, but not a quality of a leader.

An eMarketing study found that 69% of marketers said “originality” was their top challenge in 2012

Foster the Creative Process

I’m not suggesting marketers drop data-based decisions in favor of gut feelings for every decision. Clearly that’s a foolhardy proposition. However amid a world that’s cluttered with like-minded people, originality will almost assuredly always be a marketer’s challenge.

Marketing leaders should aim to foster an environment that facilitates creative thinking, that encourages calculated risk-taking, and gives our teams latitude to experiment, even to make mistakes. The bar of competition, especially in content marketing, is increasingly being raised. It may be an oxymoron, but there’s only one choice.

We should give our teams the primary colors and empower them create a mystery. If we do this, we’ll leave the puzzles to the competition and we’ll leave marketing departments to the task of figuring out which half of their budget was wasted.

One of the challenges I have noticed is the way many of us look at an idea based upon our experience and how it affects us.

On a surface level it seems harmless but sometimes we hurt potential campaigns because we don't use messaging that doesn't resonate with us but might work for someone else.

Example: That Honey Boo Boo television show makes me want to stick a fork in my eye, but clearly there are people who enjoy it so it is proof that messaging isn't always uniform which I suppose supports the art aspect of your post.

The one thing I am certain of is that people like to think we act based upon logic and reason but we often don't.

About Sword and the Script Media, LLC

Based just outside Atlanta, Georgia, Sword and the Script Media, LLC is veteran-owned public relations agency immersed in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. We focus on building consistent, sustainable, repeatable, and process-driven programs for PR, content marketing and social media. A defining difference comes down to our approach – that marketing ought to have utility. This is because marketing that helps, sells better than marketing that hypes.